Living a Dream

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...

Jenna and I spent a chunk of this week in Northern Virginia, in the area around Shenandoah National Park. Shenandoah (which it turns out I've been pronouncing incorrectly for my entire life) was great. There were hikes of all levels and lengths, varying difficulty, varying crowd-levels, and lots more. The park wasn't in full-swing yet, as some of the camping areas don't open until "summer," but there were still plenty of people out enjoying nature, which is nice. Being in nature gets me thinking. After a day of driving along Skyline Drive and doing several small hikes, we hiked a trail called Bearfence . After an incredibly fun scramble up the rocks to the actual peak, we were greeted with what I can only imagine is the best lookout point in the entire park. Sitting on top of a mountain - looking over dozens of other mountains - is a special feeling. As tiny houses in tiny faraway towns fill your vision, you start to think about how those are just people. From...

I've been looking at this photo a lot lately. I put it on Instagram with the caption "sometimes you just gotta jump" because I think that's a lesson that could be taken away from it, but I admit it's also because I like to pretend I'm a photographer on Instagram and that's what a photographer might say.  I've been looking at a lot though, and I guess there could be several reasons.  Maybe I look because I think it's a cool photo of me. Maybe I look because I wonder exactly how high that jump was. Maybe I look because I remember how cold the water was.  Maybe I look because jumping off of something is freedom. Maybe I look because that moment of anticipation before hitting the cold water is the clearest moment of thought that a human can experience. Maybe I look because Oregon, and specifically Crater Lake, is beautiful. Maybe I look because I used to be more comfortable with heights than I am now, and I remember how I was mor...

In December, Jenna was between jobs so we decided to go to Costa Rica. Not surprisingly, this was awesome. We got photos of howler monkeys mid-howl, capuchin monkeys trying to get into my backpack, sloths that were awake, and frogs galore. We also saw a few of these guys. First of all, they're giant. This guy was probably six feet long, nose to tail, and I would guess it was a solid 30 pounds (weirdly I was not able to leap out of the boat, swim to shore, climb the tree stump, and hold it to confirm its weight). Second of all, we saw several and noticed that some had back stripes on their tails while others didn't. We learned that this is essentially a sign of age. Young ones are green, older ones start to turn colors. It's not unlike getting colored spots on your skin as you get older...except those are basically just your skin dying. Anyway, going to Costa Rica was awesome and we saw all kinds of cool wildlife which I will talk at-length about in later posts. ...

Ever heard of Lecco? No, you haven't. We only heard of it because it was the destination of a regional train in Milan. We secondarily heard of it because it's the 2nd biggest town on Lake Como, where we'd been a couple weeks earlier. But this was January, and the same reasoning held up as when we went to Como; if it's January and it's warm enough to get by in a long-sleeve tee, you'd best get outside and enjoy it. So we booked a train to Lecco for the day and decided to do some hiking. It was wonderful. First view of Lecco The town itself was very similar to other towns we'd been to. It had a main walking street with loads of shops, butchers, cheeseries, and high-end clothing retailers. It had a waterfront park area where folks would stroll for what seemed like hours on end. It had all you might want, and then it also had a weirdly large number of teens, but we'll get back to that. We started toward the nearest mountain, knowing that there...

According to legend, if you visited Italy 20 years ago, you would have never heard of a place known as Cinque Terre National Park. Then some time in the early 2000s Rick Steves mentioned it as one of his favorite little places in Italy, and the tourist revolution was invigorated. Most likely, people had been visiting, but his endorsement tends to put things over the top. These days, it's one of THE stops on an Italian adventure. I can personally count almost a dozen people who've been there, and that's pretty weird considering it has no ancient ruins, no canals-for-streets, no Alps, and no world-renowned art. What it does have is all the majesty of the Italian Riviera: jagged rocky coastline, incredibly steep mountainsides starting at the shore, locally produced wine, tiny villages built into the rock-faces, hiking trails, and some of the best sunsets on Earth. Graham and I visited in late 2012 and it was the first place I've ever been where I thought "if I d...

I'm just as upset about that title as you are. Bellinzona, Switzerland. Ever heard of it? Of course you haven't - neither had I. We found out about this place because it was one stop past aforementioned Lugano on the train, and it looked just heavenly in photos. It has three main castles from medieval times that are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it's nestled between the Alps, so it seemed like a great place for our first-engaged-getaway. We hopped on the train early Saturday and arrived in town to be pleasantly greeted with a huge open-air street market, which has reportedly taken place every Saturday for the past 500 years. How cool is that? Almost by mistake, we stumbled into the first castle and promptly strolled in/around/through it for a good hour before booking it back to the hotel to drop our things off and run back to the other castles. Of course, because it's a beautiful town in the mountains, there's also a river that we had to cross betwee...

As many of you know, this whole experience has given the two of us opportunities that we never imagined in our wildest dreams. Everyone has been asking, so I'm finally going to start writing about the specific travel experiences, and I'll start with our first one. (you should know that I've been keeping a travel journal that's currently 65,000 words/105 MS word pages long and counting, with at least 10 trips left to add. Soooo if any of you know anything about the publishing world, we should talk) Before we left the States, any overtime work or a big sale at work would be followed by "That's a trip to Switzerland!" Lugano, Switzerland is just across the border from Milan, a whopping 50 minutes away via train. This was our goal for the first place to whimsically go. We arrived in Milan on a Thursday and walked around the city a tad. We walked around it a lot more on Friday. On the way home we stopped at the main railway station...and we bought tickets t...